When master painter Domenico Chiocchetti left home to join the Italian army during the Second World War, no one could have guessed where his journey would take him. Captured by the Allies,Domenico and many other Italians were taken to Orkney to build huge barriers in the sea, in terrible conditions. It seemed an impossible, hopeless task.But hope can shine through the darkest times, and when Domenico offered his skills to help build a chapel for the man of Camp 60, it marked the beginning of a change that would turn cynics into believers, enemies into friends, and lead strangers to fall in love. Gradually, with enormous trust, talent and dedication, British and Italians came together to forge a universal emblem of hope now renown the world.The Italian Chapel tells the extraordinary story of their triumph over adversity. Far from home, this small group of soldiers dared to hope, dream and love. And the incredible legacy they left – a masterpiece in plasterboard and scrap metal – is a lasting remainder of the true strength of the human spirit.

Publisher: Black & White Publishing

Pages: 256

Prize: £ 14.99

Rating :

The Italian Chapel is the true story of a group of Italian soldiers captured during the Second World War. The main character, around which everything is built, is Domenico Chiocchetti, a master painter of Moena (Trentino), captured and taken to a prison camp in the Orkneys. Here, assigned to Camp 60, he have to perform a very difficult task: quarry blocks from the island, which will be thrown into the sea to build the well known Churchill Barriers, sea barriers that should prevent the arrival of the enemy's submarines at Scapa Flow.The area's climate is harsh and always damp, the prisoners live in miserable sheet metal hut and their task seems a pointless and exhausting waste of time.Yet Italians do not break down, they fight their homesickness and melancholy by building all kinds of things, from lighters to alembics to distill liquor with what they find. They pave their camp to avoid walking in the mud, they harvest many type of plants, vegetable and flowers, and soon they begin to build a chapel. Impressed by this tenacity, even the English soldiers will appreciate the group of prisoners and make them various kinds of concessions, such as exonerate them from work in the quarry when they are busy building the Chapel. The Chapel still exists and is known all over the world as the Italian Chapel. It has now become a tourist destination for thousands of people every year. When Philip Paris visited the Chapel he got the idea of this book. He devoted himself to three years of research, during which, he interviewed all those who were involved in the building and their descendants.Paris' style is extremely pleasant, simple and direct, but not trivial. This author has an uncommon way of describing things. He is able to get to the point with no hesitations, using only short and concise phrases, which seize always the heart of the matter. The characters are and realistic, all outlined with few strokes, just enough to fix them in the mind of the reader. Their temperaments are cleverly revealed during the narration through their actions and their words. Feeling and hopes are handled with skill. Paris is not the type of author who runs away in front of similar difficulties, he faces them with competence, with the clear desire to make the reader share the characters' feelings and also share the author's admiration for the Italian POW. The dialogues are well thought out and realistic, they are the way in which the author brings the attention on the prisoners' feelings, leaving them to talk about it. This creates a stronger emotional impact than any description. The days go on all the same, the men work in the quarry except for some rebellion that sometimes winds through the POW, but it is when the men go to sleep, in the cold barracks, that they let their feelings come out. Each one talks and seeks peace in the other and together they try to recreate a normal life, but keeping in mind the memories of their homes and their lives far away in Italy. Often there are the thoughts of those who left children at home, who couldn't see them grow up, and the fear that when they see each other again, the sons will not recognize their fathers. Sometimes, it is the fear for their loved ones in a country at war that they can no longer defend that haunt the hours before sleep. And sometimes it is even the silence itself to speak, with its sharp contrast with the usual chattering and joking spirit of the Italians. These are the moments when the dismay and the hopelessness are so great that men do not know what to say. The style of Paris has an impact for its immediacy that is not, however, in contrast with feelings and emotions. This is an author that forgets nothing, especially the settings of the story. There are too many books in which the main character is the only important thing in the narration, and in which secondary characters and locations are ignored, like there is no universe around the principal facts. This is not the case of The Italian Chapel. Obviously, it is an impossible task to give voice to hundreds of prisoners, but Paris succeeds and goes beyond, adding the voices of the English soldiers and of the nearest inhabitants. He does that in choral form, in a way that resembles that of the Greek tragedy. Under various pretext, such as an hospital stay, or the need of workers in the farms of the area given the lack of men due to the war, we come to know also what there is beyond the prison camp, and we have their opinion about the war and its events not only from the Italians' point of view, but also from the British soldiers and from the inhabitants of the place, which will prove to be sometimes favorable and sometimes opposed to the presence of the Italians. This is an exchange of perspectives just outlined but very interesting. The skill of this author also emerges in the narration of a loving adventure of one of the prisoners. Well away from stereotypes and languid scenarios, Paris describes a realistic report, which analyzes more the feelings of desperation and necessity that lead to this union than the union itself, once again offering an exciting starting point for a reflection on the human being. This book is good and well structured, the negative thing I can point out -but that does not hurt too much- is perhaps the fact that Paris is a bit too soft in talking of a prison camp in the middle of World War II. It is true that fights are far away, and they only arrive in Orkney in the form of occasional news, but the evident sympathy of Philip Paris for Italians leads him to make sure that almost all of his characters, also the English soldiers, loved them too. The Italians are described as open and proud men that never lose hope and always know how to stand up again. The Italian camp is very animated, by characters, fights, friendships and thoughts. The same British soldiers feel a strong liking for the Italian camp and sometimes they even grieve for them and for their condition. Just prisoners of the other fields are the only ones hating Italians, because they are jealous of the privileges granted to them, and one of the locals who had his son killed in the war. The Italian Chapel has not yet been translated into Italian, although I hope it will be very soon. This is a very interesting novel, which collects the testimonies of our countrymen during the war, in particular describes the origin of a place (the Chapel) that brings together a large number of visitors and which in our country is almost completely ignored, even though they were the Italians that made it so important. This book is a tribute to their will and their desire to live that should not be forgotten. Philip Paris is a very good author who knows how to fascinate his readers, and it is a shame to deprive yourself of the pleasure of reading it.